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Perverted sex, Drugs, death, sorry I did that in a shameless way to get your attention. I had this great post in my head but like most of my bubbles of brilliance I did not occur at the right time so you will have to put up with this sad substandard post, assuming you read past the word sex. If you didn’t it’s ok. I am still on perverted.

The drive in was through grey colored skies and rain spattering on the windshield, which smeared a mixture of grimy bits of the great outdoors across my view of the cement truck in front of me.

The office is light with Holiday cheer and the women are light and laughing while they sting up ribbons and lights. This office is in a stark contrast to my last office of angry old men. Our tradition was that one guy would buy doughnuts, the rest of us would eat them and then the body Nazis would make fun of the fat kids in the office. It was fun, but I like this office better. Oh and we would all go back to our offices and scowl at our computers like we swallowed spoiled cheese and threw up in our mouths.

My wife wants me to enjoy Christmas this year. While I admire her plucky can do attitude, this is my favorite Christmas song.

Still, I like the fact that she cares enough to try. What if I lose my crusty grumpy old man exterior? I mean really there are not that many charming aspects that I have. I can’t afford to lose any. Sometimes I wonder about the excess and the commercialism, but on the whole I am glad people have a good time. Someone in the office mentioned that in an effort to avoid offensive religious comments their school is calling Christmas Trees, holiday bushes. I nearly spit coffee through my nose. I am now calling everything holiday bushes. I am now ready to help my wife decorate her holiday bush.

See, even I can appreciate Christmas.

Work has me studying network security and the manner in which crackers, hackers, script slackers, and whackers try to slip into the wet meaty folds of your network unannounced and unnoticed. It would be so much simpler to just not have any secrets, but for that the world would have to be a much different place.

At work they have a meeting once a week where the government drones on about stuff I am not involved in and my PM drones on about everything that other people are doing. I am not complaining, I use the time to practice doodling. I am getting better at shading and my drawings are starting to require a bit less erasing. The government is starting to demand even more meetings, so I should be able to progress to a pencil master in a year or two or at least be able to sleep with my eyes open.

I dreamed about the old man again, and I try to draw his smile. It’s a funny little smile that seems to be a mixture of exuberant joy and a grimace under the weight of some profound suffering. I can never seem to get it right, it’s the depth really. It’s beyond my ability to describe. We were sitting on a raft, drifting slowly out into the horizon, where the water seemed to cascade off the sea into a fine mist that dissolved into space.

He was reading the paper and commenting how that woman who was disfigured by her chimp was no different from the rest of us. She is neither ugly nor pretty. The fact that she has no eyes does not mean she is no less or more introspective, because an eye can’t see itself anyway.

I wondered why the boat had no oars or sail. He said that life starts with an imagined purpose and dissolves into a slow drift over the side of existence. “You go with the current, whether you are kicking and screaming or reading the paper. I suggest that you relax and do what will provide a favorable wind,” he said.

I should be busily working on these things called PRs that on the whole seem to involve changing unknown acronyms into other unknown acronyms for the same piece of equipment. It’s an exercise in futility, but when I do it, people seem to smile so I assume this makes them happy.

I need a break and one exercise is better than another.

There was a Halloween sale last weekend and I bought a pirate headband and a tattered flag, both were adorned with a skull and cross bone. I have always wanted to be a pirate. Well not a real pirate that get’s shot at and contracts scurvy. I want to be the Disney reoccurring character pirate in the Caribbean. Well, mostly I just want to sail around, break things, drink too much, and cavort with loose women. Actually, I think I just want to become a college kid again. College kid and pirate are rather the same personality with different styles. Thing is, no Halloween store has ever sold a college kid outfit.

The weather today is a half warmed over left over from somebody else’s exciting story. It’s like we are getting the left over beers on Sunday morning after the party. Everyone is too hung over to make up exciting stories and post pictures of themselves on Facebook.

Underwater the ocean takes on a kind of dark blue hue the further you look into it. Very rarely did I ever look that far into it, being content to stare at the coral or the girls in bikinis as I flopped like wet sponge into the waves. We used to skip class to do beach dives. Beach dives were nice because they were cheap, and we thought they might impress the girls. Seaweed crusted guys flopping clumsily across the sand wearing fifty pounds of equipment is just so sexy.

After I graduated high school, I can remember diving on the reef and pausing for a moment to sit in the sand and stare out into the open water. I wondered what it would be like to swim forever through the swirling dark blue water that extended out past my comprehension. What I never realized is that the further you go out the less is in front of you and the more you look back. I guess you don’t know these things when you are young.

I dreamed last night of tornados and old bald men. This happens when I eat shrimp that my wife says is probably spoiled. I say, that’s what immune systems are for. She says “that’s what common sense is for.” I figure that most people do just fine without it so there is no sense in cultivating it now.

The tornado was like the finger of a god gouging the earth. It was a swirling mass of boiling storm cloud with cracks of lightning. It scoured everything in its path to splinters and dust.

I watched it’s devastation as it inched closer. I could feel the breeze rustling the hairs on my neck.

An old man sort of sat next to me. He had this rather disconcerting way of being sort of not solid and solid depending on the light. He said “Destruction is an illusion, nothing in the universe is lost; it is merely transformed.” As he said this, a house was blended into splinters, and trees were blended into houses.

The old man pops into my consciousness sometimes. He is like Zen man, a super hero in the Tick comic universe. He only talks in a poem. In one dream I tried to grab the little bastard yelling “what good is having an empty mind,” because he kept saying that over and over. He smiled as my hands passed through him “When a mind is empty, the universe fills it with emptiness,” the little cryptic bastard said.

He may be right, but my mind is rarely empty. Sometimes I can pull it out of my ass long enough to watch a few thoughts float away, but mostly it is happy to be tormenting me.

The little guy even appears in the dreams where I am falling. I hate those dreams because I think I am rather afraid of falling to my death. In one the little old man was passively falling with me and asked “With every day that passes you are hurtling towards your death, why is this any different?.” As he said this he kept flapping his arms and laughing in the wind.

This probably comes from reading The Colour of Magic before bed by Terry Pratchett. I wish I knew this guy when the book first came out. I am forever late to the party. Or I am sometimes early to the party which is even more embarrassing. I never was good with parties.

If you want a fun but intelligent read, stop reading this drivel and go pick up one of his novels. Basically this book and Dead Pool comics have become my Twilight. I now sit and read them through the night until my eyeballs fall out, and I am unconscious.

It is so hot in here Answer Me Buddha is sweating like a fat guy in a beer tent during a southern August summer or maybe it is just me.

Running lately feels like a futile exercise against gravity. It seems every time I leave the house an elephant latches on to be dragged across the block. Actually that just may be my ass and the elephant is just something I tell myself to make me feel better.

So Howard Stern is talking on the radio about how his daughter wanted to hear his interview with M&M. He asked his assistant to find the tape and to make sure that he didn’t say anything embarrassing. He said “I want you to change history to make me look like a better person than I am.”

So I get home and my wife says that my daughter was looking over her shoulder to look at the heart pictures I drew. My first thought was “did I say something stupid”. I am sure I did. I always say something stupid and inappropriate. You guys seem to still read so I must not cross too many lines.

I am thinking about my next set of drawings. I have been practicing drawing hands. Hands are hard. See they keep moving, and they have to be proportional. They are so expressive, better than eyes. I keep drawing them over and over again, big square things with sausage like fingers. I keep drawing them, and they seem to be evolving as I go. It’s almost like they have a mind of their own, like they were created by some part of me that can’t speak. I think visual art comes from a part that has no voice, no words, and can only speak through shapes. I like it, maybe it doesn’t speak well, but that is only because it has untrained hands. Still, it seems odd that all it talks about is robots, ninjas, and people with peanut shaped heads.

There is something about drawing a heart with teeth and claws that is so interesting. After a week of not sleeping I saw my favorite witch doctor. He prescribed a muscle relaxant and some pain pills. My wife read me the side effects. The pain pills can cause you to vomit up coffee grounds, even if you don’t normally eat coffee grounds. The muscle relaxant just turns you into a human puddle. I took it at night and sunk into a hard sleep every time, but had strange dreams. I know it was a dream, because it really isn’t possible to have an in depth discussion about the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie while engaging in cunnilingus. Still, I really enjoyed her idea that it may be that western philosophy and religion doesn’t allow for a social system that is equitable across the masses. What really turned me on was when she said how capitalism was really just well managed greed and communism failed because no one wants to be the one to take out the trash. Sexiest government lesson / dream I have ever had.

The problem was that getting out of bed required a level five raise the dead spell and a 15 on a 20d roll.

I finished my drawing my second internet comic. It is about the effects of Formalin on a biology student. See, through progressive drawings and breathing in more and more toxic fumes makes one see and do funny things in the biology lab.

In a flagrant disregard for the economy of both calories and money, I am enjoying the fried crunchy goodness of KFC. They have a Taco Bell menu as well. I am waiting for them to start peddling liquor and porn so that I can get drunk and beat off, while eating deep saturated goodness. Something that popularly illicit would be run by the state. In America at least, we let the state hold all of our sins.

My shoulder has been keeping me up nights. It feels fine all day and then after I lay down, it starts burning. It seems to be getting progressively better, which is a good sign. I looked it up and pain in the shoulder blade could be anything from breast cancer to heart problems. I felt my bobbies and they seem fine.

I am still feeling rather randy lately. Feeling my boobies didn’t help. Just to be sure, I checked for testicular cancer too.

Nothing much is going on this weekend except cleaning and lack of sleep, expect something creative.

One of my vices is that I like to expose myself. Well, let me rephrase that. I like to expose myself to random bits of information. I retain just bits of it, not enough to know anything useful, just enough to make me dangerous. I hope to one day be the world’s only existential superhero.

I am drawing another comic with few words this time. This one has a human heart dissection drawing under the affects of formalin. I showed a few frames to my wife and she looked disturbed, so it passed that test. I am having trouble with the shading, but it’s easier that the last monstrosity I made.

Work has been fun. Miss “I know just everything” is trying to ask me for help. If I were an enlightened person I would help her no matter how crappy she was in the past. Instead there is a part of me that tries to help her while my ego beats the crap out of him until he shuts the hell up. There is also the fact that I am sure she will take credit for my ideas. Again, an enlightened person would not care about this. Again, I am not an enlightened person. I try to be, but it’s like trying to be a rabbit sometimes.

My next drawing project will be a baby sitter contest. I am just not sure how to draw tentacle rape monster. He is like cookie monster only horribly wrong. Thanks to d2leddy, I may also add cattle prod boy.

There is also writing and I am feeling rather antsy lately, like there is an itch I would very much like to scratch.

I just finished reading an article about a thirty-nine year old man that is joining the army for the healthcare benefits. It seems his wife has ovarian cancer and he is out of work. In this country, you either watch her die, or you join the army. Stupid woman, doesn’t she know that getting sick is only fashionable for the rich.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/64677772.html

This morning I woke up with a pulled shoulder muscle. Yeah, that’s right. I went to bed feeling perfect and woke up with a sleep related injury. My body has reached an age where sleep is a physical activity. I am the same age as this guy that will now be going through basic training with a bunch of high school kids. I am fairly certain that if I were to go through basic training, it would take all of my DI’s powers of persuasion to get me through the obstacle course. I have faith in him. I am sure he could break me down. I am not so sure he could build me back up into something resembling a soldier. This guy either has balls so big they block out the sun or is more desperate than most of us. Maybe there isn’t much of a difference.

So who wants to give me a deep tissue rub?

I once got a deep tissue rub from some Asian guy in the mall, but it felt more like he was punishing the round eye for dropping the bomb on his cities. He used his elbow in a kind of wrestling move to gouge my back and shoulders. In the end I did not feel so much as relaxed as violated.

( I scanned my drawing and here it is. )

I was going to edit it in Gimp, but in the end I thought maybe I would leave it dirty and as it is. Like anything I create, there are bits I love and bits I hate. It’s message may not be very clear to anyone but it seems to be about acceptance. The scan isn't the best, but I hope you can read it. Maybe it’s in response to this master named B. Kliban, who made this.

( hmmmmm food )

The problem with Amazon is that I can put three hundred dollars worth of grains and dry foods from Bob’s Redmill in a shopping cart with the thought that I will somehow find the time to cook. There are grains with complete protein and no cholesterol, with cool names.

I have found that I love the smell of graphite almost as much as orange degreaser. Orange degreaser smells like cycling and graphite smells like cartoons.

I finished my first 4 panel comic sketch. About a month ago I couldn’t draw a stick figure that didn’t look mildly retarded. Now I can draw retarded looking cartoon characters. This is a significant achievement for me.

See there are certain boxes that were built inside me long ago, boxes for containing things. They are made of little voices that either I put inside myself or came from words that found a home. I am getting too old for boxes.

So I finished my messy four panel sketch. The early sketches were done in pencil and then redone in ink. Then I erased the pencil marks leaving just the ink. These are cleaner, but the last two I left in pencil, and they have interesting little shadows.

Of course after I finished it, I hated it.

I am going to scan and post a version of it later anyway.

You know how we used to have VCRs and now DVRs to watch TV for us. Mine currently watches Robot Chicken and Venture Brothers. I was thinking that maybe we can get machines to handle other bits unpleasantness, while we do nothing but complain and go to parties. Yeah, you’re right. It would never work. Humanity would lose itself. Even if our machines didn’t kill us, our brains would atrophy from lack of use, and we would revert to clever monkeys.

Lately I have been wondering about things too much. Imagine if humanity was all contained in a single entity whose thoughts were an average of what we all think, and you could put it on a couch and have a psychiatrist ask it a few questions. Do you think that it would be crazy, like bat shit crazy.

The Fermi paradox is a question that asks why there are not more alien life out there, why they can’t at least warm up the anal probe, and why we have not seen any evidence of them.

See there are like 250 billion visible stars in our galaxy, and like 70 sextillion in the known universe. This number seems kind of big, but by comparison our national debt is like 11 trillion, which by comparison is like buying every citizen in the US a very nice car. Depressing, I know.

But back to the point, so let’s assume .01 percent all stars in just our Galaxy have life. If my math is correct, 2.5 million stars will have planets that support life. If we figure that .01 percent of these stars actually have planets with life, this means that 250 thousand stars in our galaxy have at least one planet with life on it. Now keep in mind that the Galaxy is like 13.2 billion years old, which means that the universe should be colonized by now, even with the distances involved.

Poll #1471190
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

So why isn’t it?

View Answers

No other civilizations currently exist
0 (0.0%)

No other civilizations have arisen
0 (0.0%)

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
2 (10.5%)

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others
0 (0.0%)

They do exist, but we see no evidence
4 (21.1%)

They are here unobserved
3 (15.8%)

They are coming back on 2012 to talk to the Mayans.
2 (10.5%)

They left after Firefly was cancelled.
8 (42.1%)

If there are any aliens reading my blog I would like to thank you for reading. As always, I appreciate my human readers as well. I would have so many questions for creature that traveled here across the stars, and pie.

Typing has become painful, but I am typing anyway. I am either a masochist or willing to suffer for my craft. As a side note, do not use hand sanitizer as a disinfectant for an open wound. It becomes tangerine scented pain.

I would say that I do it for you my readers, but if I were honest I would have to say that I do it for the attention. I like you guys, but I like you more when I think you are paying attention.

The truth is that I am a rather social creature. I need people. I spent most of my childhood trying to affect that suave disinterest that instead came out as creepy and socially awkward.

Everyone around me appears to be in that angry pent up frustrated sort of mood. As usual I am out of synch. I was like that yesterday. Today’s word of the day for me is apathy.

While running this morning I came up with another pitch to throw at cracked.com. I am going to get in there eventually. When I do I will post a link so you can all read it.

Because the best cure for apathy is doing something cool.

Slicing my finger open this morning was not pleasant. I bled all over the place in bright crimson droplets. The cat sniffed at the spots, and I wondered if she was testing to see what I tasted like. I like the cats, but I am glad that I am much bigger than they are. My wife bandaged it while I cussed a lot. This coincides with my canister filter losing a seal and slowly leaking about five gallons of aquarium water all over the carpet. My wife sucked that up with a carpet steamer while I cussed a lot.

There might be a pattern to things.

Typically I use the canister filter as a backup filter and water polisher. I have had problems with leaks before. I have decided to instead go with another solution and use a hanging canister filter. It can’t siphon water out of the tank, and it should be much easier to clean.

I am still feeling randy lately, even with the finger that is making me cranky. Someone needs to make a pill for randy thoughts. They are particularly useless.

NASA plans on bombing the moon. That’s right we are fucking crazy Americans, and we will bomb other planets. Lack of sex and heavy drinking usually coincides with ideas like bombing the moon and things that end badly after the words “watch this”. The moon thing actually makes a certain sense. They are looking for water and believe that it exists in small quantities in the lunar soil. The explosion will cause a plume of dirt to kick up and the water vapor to become visible. I suppose they could even extrapolate how much water would be in the moon given the amount of water found and the surface area exposed. The explosion will be about the size of a football field.

Already the internet loonies are making a fuss.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/10/how-to-watch-the-moon-bombing-in-real-time/

They think it will somehow effect the moon’s orbit, the seasons, or just incur god’s wrath. I say fuck it; let’s bomb all the other planets too, just to see what would happen. Hell, send nukes. These are the same internet loonies that think Obama is not a citizen and was born in another country. They ignore the fact that John McCain was born in Panama. True it was on a military base, but he was still born on foreign soil. I mean, why let things like facts muddle up a good argument. These are also the same loonies that think the Hadron Collider will cause the end of the world or transform the earth into some kind of Half Life game. They believe the Earth will end because a Mayan calendar stops on that date. Honestly, do we follow any of the other Mayan beliefs. I suppose the hysteria does make for a good movie. Someone should make a movie that combines all the hysteria in one central theme. Like final destination only dumber.

Did I mention that my finger hurts and I am cranky. :)

Have you ever had that sort of off feeling where your emotions are telling you something is wrong but your analytical mind says that nothing has changed? Then the two call each other babies until some other thought occupies the mental landscape. Oh, that is probably just me being crazy.

I feel crazy a lot lately. The problem with crazy is that there are no good benchmarks to compare normalcy to. Someone should invent a crazy scale with say a class one crazy is the guy who thinks a wild night is staying up to watch the late show to a class ten crazy where you drunk dial your ex’s current lover to flirt with them just to make life a confusing mess. You get bonus crazy points if you actually get a hookup.

In reality I am probably a two, but I have a lot of respect for the tens.

I am trying to make my pitch to cracked.com for a piece about why it’s good to be fat. The problem is that they want at least six reasons. The truth is there is only about three things that being fat does for you that’s good. Any other reasons I can find has to do with the problems of being under weight. At least I am learning how to pitch for the site. If I had the superpowers of a ten, it might be an easier sell.

I think I have had moments of crazy, but I am much too conscious of consequences to be a consistent 10.

I wonder if there is a fine line between normalcy and boring. Perhaps the healthy person is somewhere in the middle of the scale?

What do you think?

It’s only 2pm and I am ready to go home. One of the women in the office is flirting with one of the men. He doesn’t notice the way her voice changes when she talks to him. She is restrained on account of the fact that she is married, but I wonder if that will change the longer her husband stays at work and not at home. Marriage needs a steady diet of intimacy or somebody ends up like a caged animal pacing at the door.

I have traded in Howard Stern in the morning for Buddhist lectures. Today I am listening to the one about intention. Sexually these lectures are not nearly as exciting as Howard Stern, but they are always interesting.

I am bored, it is late so here is a poll.

Poll #1467379
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

The purpose of government is too.

View Answers

Coddle us like children
0 (0.0%)

Punish us when we are wrong like children
0 (0.0%)

To ensure that all citizens have a basic living standard
14 (63.6%)

To distract us from the fact that aliens rule the earth
6 (27.3%)

A broken system that would be better run by a free market capitalist system i.e. big business.
2 (9.1%)

Healthcare

View Answers

A right that should be funded by the taxpayers to pay for a level of health care for each citizen
17 (77.3%)

A for profit business
1 (4.5%)

Funded by death panels using the bones of old people as a sugar substitute
3 (13.6%)

The best in world
0 (0.0%)

Only for those that can afford it
1 (4.5%)

Love

View Answers

Between a man and a woman
0 (0.0%)

A chemical in the brain
1 (4.5%)

A need whose expression is defined by the perceptions of the people involved.
11 (50.0%)

A thing that will only lead to soul sucking pain
2 (9.1%)

What will separate us from the robot overlords
8 (36.4%)

Sex

View Answers

A dirty horrible thing if done correctly
4 (18.2%)

Baby Factory
1 (4.5%)

An expression of love
0 (0.0%)

A human need that varies from human
10 (45.5%)

A positive feedback loop for intimacy between two partners
7 (31.8%)

We just told a coworker that the worms in her plant were bot flies. The adolescent in me wants to go to the pet store, buy a box of meal worms, and sprinkle them liberally over her keyboard. This is so wrong on so many levels that it makes me giggle. I won’t do it of course, but I can imagine her coming to the office to see little white maggots wiggling through her keyboard. First there would screaming, then laughter, and then a serious meeting with my boss’s boss and HR about my actions. Some ideas are better left to my imagination.

I had this dream last night. I was in a room. I think it was the room I used to live in when I lived in Florida way back in high school. Back then my mind was a bit more creative. I would hear music in the middle of the night that was only in my mind. Sometimes I would hear conversations that didn’t exist. I would wake up and my bed would be surrounded by hideous broken forms that would dissolve when the lights were turned on. I probably had some mental deficiency, but it never bothered me that much. The music was kind of cool, except that time that the Mario Brothers three theme song played over and over again, getting louder and louder. I had to learn to disengage my mind to get it to stop. It was like having a built in Ipod before they were invented that only worked at three am.

In the dream there was something evil in the room. I was sitting on my bed looking at it. I could extend energy at it. But to destroy something is to become linked to it in some way. In the process, I could feel the fear and pain. There was a certain lust in conquering it. Rain began to fall in the room softly. The lines between me and the evil blurred. A bright light flashed and a woman was holding me, telling me everything would be ok, that I was ok.

I woke to find myself in my current bedroom.

She had a dream too. In her’s we murdered her father and shot him piece by piece out the window with a slingshot.

She is a bit like a clipped angel sometimes.

Hand over hand we climb up the rope, dragging its increasing weight. With each step we struggle with it. Until one day we let go, and we are free.

I am feeling rather randy today. If you are a woman, be glad you a far far away from me, or I would flirt with you mercilessly. I would say things like “You seem so magical that I couldn’t help but get to know you better.” Actually, as lame as that line is, I would probably say something like “ummmm ummmm ummm” before shuffling away like a George Romero zombie. My wife had to be very persistent in order to get past my social ineptitude, or maybe she is just attracted to social dorks. I am hoping to one day evolve into one of those hip old people.

My daughter told me that her latest boyfriend is a cage fighter. Had I known that before they started dating, I would have told her that she couldn’t see him. I met the kid and he seems normal enough. Still, you have to wonder about a kid that beats up cages for sport. Well, my daughter says that he beats up people for sport in a cage. I think this shows a severe lack of sense, which I guess is common among teenagers. It’s one thing to learn a martial art, maybe practice it. It is another thing to get in a cage and beat people up like you are some kind of Pit Bull. I looked at some of the fighters from the Barbarian fight club, and I noticed that they all shave their chests. Since when did a tough guy need a smooth silky chest? The good news is that her latest boyfriend lives in the next county and neither one of them knows how to drive yet. This won’t last forever, but it is nice.

Just once I would like her to bring home a kid that doesn’t want to be a rock star. Maybe he just wants to go to school and get a job. Yeah, a doctor would be nice. Maybe a doctor that isn’t a cage fighter.

The Russians are displaying what they say is Hitler’s skull with a bullet hole in it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/6243803/Russia-casts-doubt-on-Hitler-skull-theory.html

DNA testing on the bone says that either Hitler was a woman or they got the wrong skull. This means that there is no proof that Hitler is dead. I say he is still alive and is hiding in Miami. He is also a hundred and twenty years old. I am guessing he took care of himself all these years; ate lots of bran fiber and fish oil. They also say that Hitler was either a homosexual or liked to pee on people. I am guessing that anything that wasn't batshit crazy about the man was lost to us a long time ago. Now some people are saying that Obama's health care plan is a lot like Hitler's Nazi plan. I am guessing the Nazis had a public option for socialized medicine, which seems odd considering they were fascists.

By all accounts he was a brutal sick man.

But I wonder why we all hate him more than the other brutal sick men. Certainly Stalin was guilty of similar crimes. Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of millions.

Alone they were just men. Men like me, who loved, cried, grew old, and died. What about these people screamed “put me in charge”. Millions of people must have been out of their flipping minds.

Really they seem like scape goats for the bad behavior of their societies. If there is ever to be peace, the world must recognize that. Not that it is my fault. It is always someone elses.

The mornings are getting darker and so my morning runs have more stars. They blink at me overhead, and I like to think they exist to light my way as my feet pound the pavement in a regular beat over my labored breathing. In reality the stars shed their light in all directions, and there are other planets that may see their light. They only need the ability to do so. Sometimes I wonder if there is another creature gazing up at the sky and marveling at the microwaves in some sort of cosmic joke.

I finished writing the cracked article, but I have yet to post it. It is just sitting there, waiting for me. That will be my goal today, well that and eating junk food and exceeding my saturated and trans fat limits for the day.

I finished inking another frame on my comic and now I just have two more to do. It is fun. I love my moments away from everything. I have a hard time with the penciling, but I seem to be getting better.

So many things are left unfinished. So many books are not yet read. Life exists in things half done and things that were always meant to be done if only other things would happen. It’s like riding a roller coaster that goes up and up and never gets to that drop where you rush face first into the wind screaming.

Life used to be sharper, more defined. Now it seems that with each day I fade a little, as if the system is pulling me in until I will walk like a shade among the living. Modern living sometimes feels like a zombie movie only instead of pallor men feasting on their helpless victim, they are wondering around texting and typing away on computers. You don’t become one of them by being chased. You become one of them when you only do what is easy.

My band teacher used to say that one should never make a mistake softly. Play everything at the right volume, even when you screw up the notes. He also said that if he was able, he would make me a fifth chair, even though there was only three of us, and have me play my trumpet in the parking lot. I knew he was bluffing, because my talent was a bit like Orpheus, only instead of inspiring peace and beauty, I inspire a sort of murderous rage.

When I was young I used to type on an old manual typewriter my mother owned. It smelled like oil and ink and had far more character than a computer. It may have been my favorite instrument. My fingers grew stronger, pounding on the thing. Later, I took piano lessons, and beat the hell out of any keyboard unfortunate enough to cross under my hands.

I wonder about this whole art thing. If there was more of it, would it be bastardized in the same way as the written word, where everyone with an idea floats it out on the internet like a paper boat to slosh around with the millions. Most of our ideas should probably have an expiration date.

But every now and again I find a little gem. Amidst the sea of things there is a bottle with a message in it.

There is this guy that recently died. His name is Norman Borlaug. He won the noble prize for his research on wheat cultivation. I had never heard of him. Well to be fair there is a lot don’t know. I stumbled across his this page here

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14446742

and found this comment here.
This is a truly great man who saves billions of lives. Perhaps no other person in world history has directly helped so many people.
And perhaps the biggest, most important thing of all was that he did this all for free. He never asked for commission, for payment for fame. It was only for humanity that he did this.
But perhaps it is indicative of the human race that his death went largely unnoticed. Most people don't even know his name, even though about 20% of the world's people own their very lives to him.
When Michael Jackson died, headlines were everywhere. And yet Jackson, for all his greatest, cannot lay claim to save billions of lives.
But this man gets hardly any attention.
The world needs more men like him than anything else. Bill Gates, for all his plagiarism and copying, seems to be following in Borlaug's footsteps. Al Gore, Carter, Bush, Allen, and most other people are all in it for the money and fame, opening investment companies and charging thousands for speeches.
This here is a true gentleman.

He makes a good point. As a species we have such odd priorities.